(^114) › STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
produced for them was, consequently, less grand and less stylized. The middle class par-
ticularly patronized the visual arts and demanded genre paintings that depicted more
realistic scenes and themes from everyday life. The paintings and engravings of William
Hogarth, such as the series titled Marriage à la Mode (c. 1744), are examples of this genre.
By the end of the Enlightenment, the artistic world saw a resurgence of interest in the
classical Greek and Roman art forms. The neoclassical movement was sparked in part as
a reaction against the sometimes frivolous art of the Rococo period (early eighteenth cen-
tury), but also due to the renewed interest in classical philosophy, particularly the ideas of
civic virtue and democracy. Following the classical values of reason and moderation, these
paintings were often cerebral rather than emotional. In architecture, this movement saw
these ideals reflected in the construction of public buildings with columns based on ancient
Greek and Roman buildings.
The Radical Enlightenment
Diderot
As the monarchs and ruling regimes of Europe showed the limits of enlightened despot-
ism, the elements of Enlightenment thought came together in increasingly radical ways.
The multi-volume Encyclopedia (1751–1772), containing 28 volumes, was produced by
the tireless efforts of its co-editors, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. Their
stated goal was to overturn the barriers of superstition and bigotry and to contribute to
the progress of human knowledge. The entries of the Encyclopedia championed a scien-
tific approach to knowledge and labeled anything not based on reason as superstition.
Its pages were strewn with Enlightenment thought and the rhetoric of natural rights that
was egalitarian and democratic. King Louis XV of France declared that the Encyclopedia
was causing “irreparable damage to morality and religion,” and twice banned its publication.d’Holbach
Another more radical position was that of the German-born French philosophe, the Baron
Paul d’Holbach, whose philosophy was openly atheist and materialist. In System of Nature
(1770), d’Holbach offered the eighteenth-century reader a view of the world as a complex
system of purely material substances, acting and developing according to purely mechanical
laws of cause and effect, rather than having been imposed by a rational God.Rousseau
Perhaps the most influential radical voice emerged at mid-century, articulating a view of
human nature that differed from Locke’s tabula rasa and that suggested different politi-
cal implications. In Émile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans were born
essentially good and virtuous but were easily corrupted by society. Accordingly, Rousseau
argued that the early years of a child’s education should be spent developing the senses,
sensibilities, and sentiments.
Politically, Rousseau agreed with his predecessors that individuals come together to
form a civil society and give power to their government by their consent. But where Locke
and Montesquieu were content with a constitutional monarchy, Rousseau’s model was the
ancient Greek city-state in which citizens participated directly in the political life of the state.
He expressed his discontent with the political state of affairs in The Social Contract (1762):
“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Accordingly, Rousseau believed that the
virtuous citizens should be willing to subordinate their own self-interest to the general good15_Bartolini_Ch15_099-118.indd 114 27/04/18 1:54 PM